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Program Cycle

The Program Cycle is USAID’s operational model for planning, implementing, assessing, and adapting development programming in a given region or country. The Program Cycle is how policy gets translated into action and how USAID supports countries on their Journey to Self-Reliance.

Toolkits

USAID Learning Lab hosts three toolkits to provide USAID staff and implementing partners with a curated set of resources to plan, implement and integrate monitoring, evaluating and CLA practices into their programs.

About CLA

Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) is a framework and a set of practices for strengthening organizational learning and the conditions that enable it throughout the Program Cycle to improve our development effectiveness, and support countries on their Journey to Self-Reliance.

Using a CLA Approach Towards a Better Way for Indoor Residual Spraying

Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) is an effective method of fighting malaria, but is very expensive and is often done inefficiently and to lower effect than possible. As an organization, we took time to Pause & Reflect and imagine a better approach to IRS. We brought in partners through External Collaboration to create a new framework for approaching IRS, using evidence-based Decision-Making, and ended up creating an approach called mSpray. We believe that, given the right support and adoption, mSpray could significantly improve results host-country governments see within their IRS operations, and contribute to the overall Technical Evidence Base.

The path to arriving at this milestone has not always been a direct one. We have often had to shift our short-term objectives with the overall goal of making IRS operations more effective. We are constantly gathering as much feedback from users of the mSpray system at all levels as possible, and have taken an Adaptive Management approach to course-correct when that feedback showed us we could have been doing something better.

Above all, we have sought a culture of transparency and collaboration in this undertaking with the belief that more access to data by more people at all levels of the operation will in fact make that data more reliable and rich, thus even further driving its adoption and use. We have already seen success, but the approach still has much room for growth and deeper development.

The information provided on this website is not official U.S. government information and does not represent the views or positions of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the U.S. Government.